Creative writing and novel writing advice I wish I'd given myself years ago

Tag Archives: openings

Check listers – the life-saving nerds

A check list. Not the most flamboyantly creative solution to a writer’s journey, but a pretty useful base camp. Masters of a craft of course have an auto-checklist – just as any experienced traveller subconsciously cycles through the daily requirements and quickly senses when something is missing. Such is craft.

If you’re not yet on auto-pilot, though, a list can push some useful questions at you. It needs to be your own check list – you can’t engage with some other anal-retentive’s bullet-pointing habits. That’s not to say you can’t take a few looks at what others are doing – others’ lists of essentials are part of that hive-mind development to which centuries of literature are testament. But make it your own. It’s your writing it has to work with.

Against the grain – I’m not the most natural list-maker – I’m trying to evolve a check list of what to put on the first page of a novel or, what to look for on the first page of a novel – gradually it’s seemed more like a wish list – sometimes it seems like it could work for any fiction – sometimes it seems to offer just some possibilities to think back over.

First pages of novels – the welcome mat on which the hasty traveller wipes her feet

Why a first page check list? There are plenty of blog posts about not getting trapped in the minutiae of first lines and first paragraphs – and they’re right. There’s no point blowing your valuable time titivating a primary page if everything else is sliding into oblivion.

When everything’s looking good, though, when you’ve got your magnificent work in place – and it is magnificent, trust me, you can’t put years of work into something and it not be magnificent in one way or another – at that point give the first page of the novel a last rigorous check against a robust set of known non-variables. This is, after all, the calling card, the best foot forward, the tice and tempter – this might be all anyone ever sees.

And at the backs of our minds, however much we try to ignore it, we can’t help pondering what those fiends in the publishing business will think as their gattling-gun fingers rattle our offerings from in-box to trash. That submission of yours is one of thousands they’ll be skimming and binning between the breakfast pastries and the first triple espresso. Maybe – just maybe – they may snag on something of what you’ve spent your hours on, they may feel the feelings you’re trying to express, wake up to your USP – but then, who knows if they have human feelings anyway, such is business.

Forget publishing biz. If nothing else you can reflect on whether you’ve produced your best work and whether there’s an easy-to-open doorway into that best work, or whether you’ve accidentally laid a minefield of savage and inhospitable material and a wasteland of dullness at the entrance.

What a reader should get from the opening page of the novel

It’s equally obvious that a rewarding first page of fiction can come in thousands of possible forms from a set of jarring words or series of punctuation marks through to something that’s actually worth reading and those novels whose first pages have gone down in literary history. “Tom!” “It was the best of times…” “It is a truth universally…” “and the clocks were striking thirteen”. There are many ways to flay this feline.

This then is some basics that I felt I wanted or needed when I looked at a first page – a list I came up with as I culled from here and there and added my own learning from favourite first 500 word blocks, opening paragraphs and so on, particularly when venturing near unknown authors’ works.

As a reader I want to believe :

It is clear who or what I need to focus my attention on here

This prose has made me engage emotionally and/or intellectually

I could trust this author. They know how to write for me

I have a strong sense of setting through salient detail that I’m hoping will expand

I have a strong sense of character through salient detail that I’m hoping will expand

I feel my emotions shifting around what is written here

I admire / pity / fear / am amused by this character

I sense a threat and want to know what the character’s response will be

I sense conflict and want to follow the counter response

I’m predicting the immediate next step for this character in terms of a clear problem or opportunity

I would want to know what happens to this character longer term

I would be sorry not to find out what this page leads to.

This seems to get a little bit further than just hopeful ‘give it your best shot’ advice. It speaks to mechanics and fundamentals rather than prescribing a type or style or formula. It allows for all but the most ‘experimental’ of openings, and might even give the experimenter some consciousness of what aspects they’re experimenting with. What it doesn’t give is the ‘how’ and that’s where personal inspiration and industry can be allowed near the list.

That’s my current list. It might change next week. Good luck with your own.